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Kate Raworth's Top Book Recommendations

Want to know what books Kate Raworth recommends on their reading list? We've researched interviews, social media posts, podcasts, and articles to build a comprehensive list of Kate Raworth's favorite book recommendations of all time.

1
Building an Economy That Works for All

As long as businesses are set up to focus exclusively on maximizing financial income for the few, our economy will be locked into endless growth and widening inequality. But now people are experimenting with new forms of ownership, which Marjorie Kelly calls generative: aimed at creating the conditions for life for many generations to come. These designs may hold the key to the deep transformation our civilization needs.

To understand these emerging alternatives, Kelly reports from all over the world, visiting a...
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Recommended by Kate Raworth, and 1 others.

Kate RaworthGoes straight to the question of how a company is set up, structured, owned, financed, and networked. (Source)

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2
The biggest "tragedy of the commons" is the misconception that commons are failures—relics from another era rendered unnecessary by the market and state. Think Like a Commoner dispels such prejudices by explaining the rich history and promising future of the commons—an ageless paradigm of cooperation and fairness that is re-making our world.

With graceful prose and dozens of fascinating stories, David Bollier describes the quiet revolution that is pioneering practical forms of self-governance and production controlled by people themselves. Think Like a Commoner...
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Recommended by Kate Raworth, and 1 others.

Kate RaworthBollier gives us the chance to reimagine the commons and recognise their potential. (Source)

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3

Cradle to Cradle

Remaking the Way We Make Things

"Reduce, reuse, recycle," urge environmentalists; in other words, do more with less in order to minimize damage. But as architect William McDonough and chemist Michael Braungart point out in this provocative, visionary book, such an approach only perpetuates the one-way, "cradle to grave" manufacturing model, dating to the Industrial Revolution, that creates such fantastic amounts of waste and pollution in the first place. Why not challenge the belief that human industry must damage the natural world? In fact, why not take nature itself as our model for making things? A tree produces... more

Joe GebbiaWas hugely influential. (Source)

Kate RaworthHelped me to reimagine how industry could be designed to work with, rather than against, the cycles of the living world. (Source)

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4

Thinking in Systems

A Primer

Meadows’ Thinking in Systems, is a concise and crucial book offering insight for problem solving on scales ranging from the personal to the global. Edited by the Sustainability Institute’s Diana Wright, this essential primer brings systems thinking out of the realm of computers and equations and into the tangible world, showing readers how to develop the systems-thinking skills that thought leaders across the globe consider critical for 21st-century life.

Some of the biggest problems facing the world—war, hunger, poverty, and environmental degradation—are essentially system...
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Tobi Lütke[Tobi Lütke recommended this book on the podcast "The Knowledge Project".] (Source)

Kate RaworthIt was a real revelation for me to discover such a different approach to thinking and analysing challenges. (Source)

Mira KirshenbaumA nice overview of how initial conditions lead to patterns that determine what the relationship feels like to the people in it (Source)

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5

Metaphors We Live By

The now-classic Metaphors We Live By changed our understanding of metaphor and its role in language and the mind. Metaphor, the authors explain, is a fundamental mechanism of mind, one that allows us to use what we know about our physical and social experience to provide understanding of countless other subjects. Because such metaphors structure our most basic understandings of our experience, they are "metaphors we live by", metaphors that can shape our perceptions and actions without our ever noticing them.

In this updated edition of Lakoff and Johnson's influential...
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Recommended by Kate Raworth, Tristan Harris, and 2 others.

Kate RaworthI became aware of all the metaphors embedded in the way I speak and, therefore, the way I think about what is and what isn’t possible. (Source)

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